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Comment by ninefathom | Hacker News Reader

These types of things always make me chuckle. There are many aspects of '80s and '90s computing for which I'll wax nostalgic, but the monochrome CRTs are not among them. One could hardly have designed a better instrument for destroying eyesight, and I wince every time I need to pull out my lone remaining VT420 for anything.

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Yes, one absolutely could! In the eighties Amstrad sold their home computers as combo with colour "monitors" (really, TV sets w/o receiver). Monochrome monitors (sharp, due to lack of shadow mask) with long persistence phosphor and hence flicker-free were balsam for the eyes in comparison.

Mind, other home computers were typically connected to the families tv set at that time ...

> colour "monitors" (really, TV sets w/o receiver).

What do you think a colour monitor is?

Good RGB monitors would have higher resolution (finer mask), higher quality, faster electronics for better signal fidelity and higher bandwidth (for higher resolution) and (depending on intended application) phosphors with longer persistence to avoid flicker.

That wasn't really a thing back then. The Amstrad CPC home computers had a tube with a finer shadowmask than the "proper" PC monitors of the day, after all.

Domestic TV shadowmasks were way way way finer than the 320x240ish resolutions common at the time, and indeed could be finer than 640-pixel horizontal resolution. Bear in mind that a broadcast-spec camera at that time ought to resolve 800 horizontal lines.

I'm curious to know what you still need to pull out a hardware vt420 terminal for!

OpenVMS on VAX. There are plenty of terminal emulators out there that are 99% VT420 compatible. On *nix it's rare to notice that remaining 1%, but on VMS it's noticable.

Try xterm. Guy who develops it has a VT compatibility test suite, which most terminal emulators fail because they're mainly crappy xterm emulators. Xterm was/is written to actually emulate terminals.

xterm? Never heard of it.

In all seriousness though... sorry, friend - that's a negative re: xterm vt420 compatibility.

Quoting from the [current] author's own website at invisible-island.net/xterm/ :

"[xterm] also implements most of the control sequences for VT220, as well as selected features from other DEC terminals such as VT320, VT420, and VT520."

That "selected features" bit is why I keep the real glass one around. Paging is probably the most deficient area that I really notice.

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